SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1366 Incorrect string value: ‘\xE2\x80\x8B\xE2\x80\x8B…’ for column

If you get this (or similar) when trying to insert/update in a MySQL database, you table is not able to cope with the extended version of the UTF8 character set.

You will need to convert your table to use the utf8mb4 character set, and utf8mb4_unicode_ci collation.

An example to do so:

ALTER TABLE `your_table_here` CONVERT TO
  CHARACTER SET utf8mb4
  COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;